


Safe

by high_functioning_hobo



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Brief description of violence, Dubious Morality, FrostIron - Freeform, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mention of torture, Nightmares, PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-09
Updated: 2013-04-14
Packaged: 2017-12-07 23:07:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/754168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/high_functioning_hobo/pseuds/high_functioning_hobo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark has demons looming over his shoulder, demons he never quite shook off his back when they made their home in his mind. Loki Laufeyson is no stranger to demons himself, and he wants to help, in the only way that he knows how.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A little exercise in writing involving PTSD!Tony and a protective/ possesive Loki. Please ignore my summary i am horrible at writing those. The way the story is going to progress, Tony and Loki are going to attempt to deal with this together, perhaps not in the most conventional of ways but they're going to try. I hope you enjoy my story, which i will attempt to update regularly (despite that its ultra short compared to other stuff) but thanks for taking a look anyway.

The choir of voices screaming in foreign languages ring in his ears, as he is dragged by the shoulders into a dark room. A pair of hands are clamped on his chest, keeping him together, trying to keep him upright. The seeping of blood through any items of clothing they haven’t ripped off him yet would bother him, if he hadn’t been fighting the urge to pass out for the past hour. And he wanted to pass out so badly and forget about the searing pain starting from where his rib cage used to be and coursing throughout the rest of his body. But phantom hands kept slapping his face and screaming at him in every goddamn language except English.

His vision is blurred; blood and sweat in his eyes make it hard to see. The events of how he ended up in a cave in the desert with a gaping hole in his chest seem like an instant and an eternity. A bomb goes off, and suddenly he is blasted off of his feet, and faceless bodies emerge from the hills and haul him into a jeep like a sack of potatoes. His blood is everywhere, stained on the sand and on the hands of his captors. There is pain, there is so much pain that he cannot think, cannot shift his focus to anything else but the sharp, white intrusions of sensation taking over his body. Mind over matter didn’t mean shit now, even a genius isn’t impervious to the awareness of his body being ripped apart by shrapnel. They put a sack over his head, as if it wasn’t hard enough to breathe already, and lay him down on the floor of the jeep and let him bleed there. He tries to move his hand up to his chest and examine the damage, but the screaming resumes and he is pinned down before the thought has finished forming in his mind, and the yelling and grunting of various languages resumes in higher tones. The jeep soars through the dunes, going as fast as the sand allows, and he counts the number of times one of the ties from the tarp that served as a roof hit the frame of the car with and audible clang.

When they finally do come to a stop, the sack is roughly removed from his face and he is urged to stand. When his hooded captors find that he cannot, two sets of impatient arms grab him by the shoulders and begin to drag him. They are not considerate, he loses his shoes in a matter of seconds and the sand cuts like a jagged edge through the soles of his feet. When they reach a concrete surface he attempts to haul himself upright, but his heels are raw and flayed bloody and the sand in his new wounds stings like a thorn.

He is lifted onto a metal table and a bright white lamp is shone in his face like a grotesque invitation to die and walk into it, an offer he would be sorely tempted to accept right now if only to be rid of the burden of pain his body had been reduced to. An unmasked man comes up to the table and presses the nozzle of a bottle filled with clear liquid to his mouth. He swallows as not to choke, and tries not to make a sound as the alcohol burns down his throat. That effort doesn’t last very long. One seldom forgets the first time a scalpel cuts through their skin while they’re still conscious.

\------------------------------------------------

Tony wakes up screaming. 

He is sitting upright in bed, chest heaving from trying to catch his breath and his hand clasped onto the arm that belonged to the figure that was looming over him and had stirred him out of his nightmare. 

“Stark,” says Loki softly, “it’s only me.” 

 

Tony couldn't bring himself to answer. The nightmare he’d been having was as vivid as though it had happened only yesterday and not four years ago and the terror that those images brought to him were just as real as the moment they had occurred, and once terror had taken its grip over him there wasn't much he could do. He couldn't talk, he couldn't move, he could only breathe. Breathe, keeping time to the rising and falling of his chest, and hold on to Loki’s arm like it could make the world stop spinning and his heart stop pounding if he held on tight enough. 

They wouldn’t talk about this. You would think that if Loki was around Tony Stark long enough to witness him having vivid and terrifying flashbacks in the middle of the night that they would have talked about it. But then again there were a lot of things they didn’t talk about. They were men after all, and men who’d gone through hell and back through different channels didn’t find talking about things very appealing. Having to relive the worst moment of your life every time you tried to sleep at night can only be worsened by trying to explain to someone how much it hurt you without being humiliated by how helpless it actually made you feel. Loki didn’t come here to sit around a camp fire and swap sob stories with him, Tony thought to himself, and there was no reason to have unnecessary conversation with him. So they didn’t talk about it, it was the unspoken rule. 

Loki showing up in Tony’s bedroom in the middle of the night was another one of those things they didn’t talk about. It was such a common occurrence nowadays that it became habit and fell out of the spectrum of things you might think about considering being a bad idea

The first time Loki shows up unannounced in the Stark tower in the middle of the night, Tony is walking out of the shower when reindeer games decides to show up in a cloud of smoke and mirrors like a bad Vegas lounge act, and scaring Tony right out of his skin. The blood curling scream of surprise is enough to make Loki disappear twice as fast as he showed up, leaving behind a very startled and very confused Tony Stark behind him. The second time, a week later, Tony’s had a bad day. He’s tired, and pissed off, developing an annoying migraine, and the arc reactor is making everything he eats taste like coconut again, and he is at the stress level of ‘about to punch a wall in frustration’. So when the psycho prince of antlers shows up in his kitchen once again while he’s choosing a brandy, he pours him a drink and asks him how his day was. Fuck it, he had thought, I’d rather hear about anybody else’s day but mine, even if it was daddy issues –r – us sitting across from him. So when Loki shows up a third time, and one drink turns into finishing the bottle, Tony doesn’t resist when he’s being pushed back onto his bed and the Asgardian is kissing him with a feverish hunger that cannot be matched. After all it was rude to turn down a willing participant. 

Tony Stark is a man of few scruples. “It’s just sex” he tells himself, because there is no one else he needs to convince. Loki is hardly the first man he’s had in his bed and by far not the first criminal. He was the first one from SHIELD’s most wanted list, however. That much made whatever was left of his moral compass realize that what he was doing was a colossally bad idea. But Loki was lying low, obviously avoiding whoever he had failed to deliver to when his glorious world domination didn’t quite work out, and as long as he wasn’t wreaking havoc or planning hostile global takeovers, Tony was pretty okay with it. More than okay actually because the sex was good, fuck the sex was really good. Sleeping with someone who has physically thrown you out of a window really puts that extra edge on things. Or maybe it was just Loki. The man was a sexual enigma, with a mouth that could coax you into ecstasy whispering honey coated litanies of praise and raise welts of lust and passion on your skin. Everyone else Tony has ever taken into his bed paled to insignificance next to Loki, and Tony’s been around. He’s fucked, nailed and screwed his way through dozens of girls that weren’t worth more than the nice pair of legs they walked around on.

Feelings and emotions weren’t for him, no, Stark men always had reputations to uphold and businesses to run, no time for things as fleeting and useless as that. Some feelings you just had to overlook. Like how he’d started to wait for Loki to appear in his bed every night, and that it definitely wasn’t disappointment he felt when he didn’t. And it wasn’t as if he wouldn’t have liked to sleep with any of the plethora of women who threw themselves at him on a regular basis, they just seemed to get less attractive over time, absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he hadn’t slept with anyone but Loki for the past 5 months. It was completely untrue that Loki had begun to wander into his thoughts by day, and consume him completely the minute he left every night. This wasn’t dangerously close to monogamy, of course it wasn’t. He was Tony Stark and that was Loki Laufeyson and it was just sex. 

“So what do we do now Stark, huh.” Tony thinks to himself, because look at him, he’s shaking like a fucking child and Loki is grabbing him by the shoulders trying to steady him and coax him out of it. “Get it together Tony come on fucking get it together!” He tries to say it to himself out loud, but his voice fails him and lets out a choked sob and a gasp of breath. He’s shaking so hard now he can barely stay on his bed, and he hates it, god he fucking hates the nightmares that reduce him to a pile of nothing. He lets out another strangled sob and grabs on to the only thing he can, that is Loki. Tony grips his shoulders with shaking fingers and tries not to look him in the eye. “Come on Tony, you’re awake, you’re fucking awake, they’re not going to get you here, snap out of it Stark”. He tries, fuck does he try to calm himself down, but not today, his mantra of harsh self-motivation wasn’t going to cut it this time. Afghanistan was looming over his shoulder and that god forsaken cave and everything they did to him in there are fresh wounds and they warn him that they weren’t going away any time soon. 

“Stark. It’s me, Stark, It’s Loki. That’s right, you know who I am. It’s only me.”

Loki lifts his hand to Tony’s face and lifts his chin up so he can face him. No chance of avoiding contact now. They lock eyes and Tony sees concern and kindness staring back at him. Things he never imagined he could find in a tyrant’s eyes, much less Loki’s. It is a soothing look though, and Tony’s body responds to it, whether he is aware or not. He stops shaking so violently, his body only spasming in short tremors and heavy breath. “That’s good Tony, you know it’s me, I’m not going to hurt you.” Loki whispers softly to him and the next minute his hand is up Tony’s back and rubbing in a circular motion over his tense muscles. Loki is acting like a mother coaxing a child out of a bad dream, and Tony couldn’t care less what that meant right now. It was working, he could breathe again, and a feeling of beyond gratitude was welling up inside of him. 

Emotionally and physically drained from the stress of his nightmare, Tony really can’t take it anymore. The list of things he was supposed to worry about just kept piling up and becoming even more impossible to manage. Stark Industries, the Iron Man persona, SHIELD, The Avengers, Pepper, The United States Government, everyone needs a piece of him when he constantly feels less than his best. He was a grown man having nightmares for Christ’s sake, he can’t even handle himself like an adult anymore. Not to mention that the wanted criminal he was only having casual sex with was now cradling him in his arms and telling him everything was all right now. But things were very fucking far from all right. So Tony did the only thing that came naturally now. He fell forward into Loki’s chest and let the tears he had been choking back fall freely, as everything slipped a little more out of his control. 

And what does that bastard do, he fucking holds him, Loki just holds him as he cries silently into his chest like there was nothing else he can do. Tony lets his despair take over him as he buries himself into Loki’s chest and tries to hide from the world. Loki stays silent and lets him cry, wraps his arms around him and gently rocks him back and forth. And for the first time in a while Tony doesn’t feel like he’s drowning out into oblivion. 

It takes a while for the tears to stop coming but eventually they do. Loki doesn’t stop rocking him, and Tony finds he doesn’t want him to stop. He slides his arms beneath the other man’s and just holds on to him like a lifeline. He drinks Loki in, the smell of him, the feel of his arms around him, the fluttering of his heart beneath where Tony’s face was resting. This was something Tony had never experienced before, something as simple as human contact creating an aura of peace and serenity around them. The lustless touch of skin on skin that soothes and comforts like nothing else. 

Somewhere in that embrace he has calmed down and Tony finds is voice again. “Don’t leave me”, he murmurs against Loki’s chest. He doesn’t look up. Fuck if its begging, he knows its begging, but he doesn’t want to be alone, not tonight. They’ve crashed through so many of their barriers already, there was no harm in seeing if he could push Loki a little farther. 

“No Stark,” Loki speaks up after a while, “I won’t leave.” Tony feels relief rush over him an instant. They remain in their embrace for a few more fleeting moments before Loki convinces him to lie back down into bed. Their bodies are separate for less than two seconds before Loki is curled protectively around him. “Sleep Stark,” he says, as he gently runs his fingers through Tony’s hair, “I’m not going anywhere.” And for once Tony is compelled to obey.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little Loki point of view to fill us in on the situation. He's having these damn things we call feelings and they're very worrying to him. Sorry this chapter is shorter than the last but its a filler really, the main events are coming up soon. Hope you enjoy it anyway :)

Loki likes to think he knows Stark. In quite a liberal meaning of the word that it is, Loki is a very perceptive man and reading people came naturally to him and he finds that he can pick up things about Stark’s life that he had not actually told him about. Not that they shared that much about each other anyway, but Loki was quite certain he was more of a mystery to Stark than Stark was to him. He knew for certain that he was intelligent, much more so than the average midgardian. He knew he made his own armor and strange technology without magic, and that it was the envy of the rest of Midgard, such was the extent of Stark’s ingenuity. He experiences first hand Stark’s arrogance and dry humor too often for his liking (although the little voice of honesty in his head would not openly admit that he had begun to find it charming). That Stark was charming all knew without a doubt, he could spin a story with a smile and a cheeky glint in his eye and get what he wanted out of almost anyone. He knew the little circle of light fitted into Stark’s chest was of his own making, yet he also knew that it had not come to be there out of favourable circumstances despite the fact that he understood that it was vital to keeping him alive. Above all he knew that Tony Stark was a fighter, with a spirit as steadfast and unbreakable as a mountain, a man who spat in the face of adversity, solved a challenge with defiance in his eyes and then called it his bitch. And it made Loki’s blood boil now, to see the mighty Stark, an iron man with or without his armor, reduced to a shaking, fearful boy clutching onto him desperately like an anchor line cast uselessly into the eye of a storm. 

This was not the Tony Stark that Loki knew, because it was not a part of him that he had ever taken the time to examine as closely as today. There was fear in Stark’s eyes, a fear Loki knew that was repressed so far back that he could only acknowledge it when he no longer had control over his subconscious. But Loki had seen fear in Stark before, that minute that he had grabbed him by the neck and thrown him out of his own building, and instead of letting fear take over and accepting his fate, Stark had out witted him with a few simple tricks and his own ingenuity. Loki had been watching the battle unfold quite closely after that. He had seen Stark in his armor hang on to a missile and direct it at an open portal into the other end of space. Stark had known the risks of course, better than most, certainly, and no doubt a glimmer of fear had come over him, but there was no hesitation as he flew straight on to destroy the Chitauri army by himself. No it was not fear that had done this to Tony Stark, Loki had witnessed it himself. Fear turned Stark into something else entirely, it made him fight ten times as fierce as he had before, made him go a little farther, a little faster just because he was afraid. Fear, Loki saw, had only ever served to fuel the rage and determination within him, because Stark was adamant beyond anything else that he would not allow fear to get the better of him. 

What Loki was seeing now desperation, a memory, a happening so dark and horrible that Stark was so desperate to forget but for the life of him could not. It was eating away at him from the inside, tearing his spirit away from him piece by piece until there was nothing left to keep on fighting. No this was beyond fear, someone had taken the time to do this, to break Stark slowly and intimately in a way he would never quite shake off. It was a despicable act, low even for Loki himself. And for the life of him he could not fathom why someone would want to destroy a creature like Tony Stark in this way. His own bias aside of course, Loki found Stark to be enigmatic, not just a suitable and equal lover, but a puzzle waiting to be solved, someone who managed to be complex yet so startlingly simple at the same time, a walking paradox. Stark was an object of beauty and value, unique amongst the drones of averagely boring human life, and that someone would want to destroy him instead of finding a way to bend it to their will was a fool’s errand all in itself. Men like Stark did not break easy, although whoever had been at him had succeeded in part tearing him up. This didn’t make Stark any less of a person of value, and the more Loki was around him, the more he thought what a marvelous thing it would be to possess him. 

And what a thing it would be, Loki often thought, to own Tony Stark in every way it was possible to own another human being. To be able to ravage him and please him and use him for his own pleasure in return. To watch him do mundane things, watch him work, watch him sleep and not be afraid to aggravate him, and to be able to become aggravated with Stark without scaring him off. To pull him apart at the seams and lay bare his soul and to make him whole again in a single breath. To be able to lie beside him every night and whisper gently in his ear, “Mine”, and never let him forget it. 

It’s really all Loki can think about as he holds Tony in his arms while Stark lets hot tears falls against his chest. Loki ignores them, it only makes him hold Stark tighter as he rocks him gently back and forth, back and forth, as his mother had done when she used to coax him out of his own nightmares. Loki has pulled Stark onto his lap in his embrace, bare chested, raw and exposed, and he revels in this new found intimacy that it yields. He cares not of this display of weakness as he would normally perceive it. After all strong men were not devoid of weakness, only men who had not allowed their weakness to poison their strengths. The difference between the strong man and the weak was not in bravery but in selfishness, in how much you allowed others to share in your weakness was where true strength lies. And Stark had been brave for long enough that he deserved this, this one time where he could revel in his weakness and be despaired by it. To be a little selfish and feel devastated at what someone had done to him. And from what Loki could gather now whatever they had done to him wasn’t a simple battle to pick. It was a scar that ran deep and would even over time would never stop bleeding just a little. 

Loki gives him this. It is all he can give him in this moment, a shoulder to rest his weary head on and a silent acknowledging compassion. Stark is responding to his touch he can tell, when he looks him dead in the eyes they swim into focus this time. He begins to shake a little less the longer Loki is holding him, a relief for them both. Back and forth, back and forth, motion was a comfort to them both, for the demons that had driven Stark into this panic had also woken a rage within Loki that he could not quite explain. How dare they, he thinks to himself, how dare they cause harm to something that he himself coveted. To destroy something beautiful is not only a crime but a sin. To want to destroy something beautiful is a sign of stupidity and greed. Loki was no stranger to the allures of destruction, it was an acquired taste for the perverse. To destroy allows you to wield a power that cannot be reversed, a reminder that your actions are permanent and that everyone who encounters it will feel the consequences of your decision. Oh yes, Loki was all too familiar with the sweet taste of that brand of power, like the feeling of old magic, the power of destruction left everything set in stone, for what is destroyed cannot be once more. 

But for all its allure to him, Loki is disgusted by it now. For its appeal to him, as a creature so wrapped up in his misery that to destroy was the only joy left to him, vanishes into nothing when he sees the aftermath of great destruction weighing upon Stark’s soul. It was dark and vile, and something he never wanted to see in Stark’s eyes again. Of course it enraged him, because he of all people knows, he knows exactly what it takes to break a man, what sort of villainy is required to make someone cower in their very sleep. To break a hard man took acts of unspeakable violence and rancid manipulation of the mind, and in Loki’s mind no one had the right to do that to someone he had claimed. 

That’s right, he thinks to himself, no better time than now to admit it, at least for his own conscience. He had claimed Stark for his own, out of the millions of little lives that were at his disposal on Midgard, he had chosen Stark. That Stark had come as a willing participant had nothing to do with the matter, and neither was his growing attachment to him. He was a god, and whatever he lay claim to as his own was to be treated with the due respect. And whosoever dared to thread on shallow water with what was his, show even the slightest intention of causing it harm, with face his wrath. God of Mischief, God of Lies, God of Fire, they were not just titles, they were threats. Play with fire and you will get burnt, so the saying goes. And Loki intended to make good on those threats whether the offence was committed before his involvement or not, this was still an offence to him. Because for all intents and purposes, Tony Stark belonged to him, and whoever had sought to destroy Stark, had sought to destroy Loki now. 

“Sleep Stark,” he tells him, as he sees the waves of fatigue looming in his eyes, “I’m not going anywhere.”

That simple don’t leave me had been the words that sealed his fate. Loki would not leave. Stark will not be harmed. Their fates would be intertwined from this moment onwards. 

“You are mine now,” Loki whispers to the sleeping Stark. 

And what was Loki’s, Loki would protect and avenge till his very last breath.


End file.
